Software : Microsoft makes it easier for students to get Office 365 for free

Microsoft makes it easier for students to get Office 365 for free
Beating bottlenecks amid the big data deluge
Updated: Apple may do away with Beats Music brand, streaming service is safe
In depth: The Best of Maker Faire NYC 2014

Microsoft makes it easier for students to get Office 365 for free

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Whether it's traffic cones, take-away leaflets or entry to bars before 11pm, when it comes to students, free = glee. Microsoft is looking to capitalise on this by giving students the chance to snag access to its Office 365 productivity suite for the princely sum of nothing.

Microsoft has offered Office 365 to student for free since October last year as part of its Student Advantage programme, but they can now apply directly for the first time, the company wrote in a post on the company's Office blog. Previously, the school, college or university's IT department had to apply on their behalf.

Qualifying students get the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher, which can be installed on up to five PCs or Macs, along with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage.

Applicants aged 13 and over can apply by visiting Microsoft's Office 365 for Students site, where they will need to supply a valid school-provided email address.

Pro plus

The promotion is limited to the US at present ahead of a global rollout later this year, and applicants must attend a school that has purchased Office for all faculty and staff using the Microsoft Volume Licensing programme.

Microsoft has also announced that it is giving students and teachers in US schools that purchase Office for all their faculty and staff members access to Office 365 ProPlus for free.

The decision was made so that staff members are using the latest and same version of Office as students, Microsoft wrote in the post.

The cloud conundrum: who actually owns your data?

Beating bottlenecks amid the big data deluge

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What is a storage bottleneck? And how can you avoid it?

Thomas Pavel, EMEA Storage Sales Director at Avago Technologies, told us about the strains caused by the data deluge and how your organisation can avoid them.

TechRadar Pro: What are the biggest challenges of the data deluge?

Thomas Pavel: The volumes of published information and data continue to grow unabated, fuelled by demanding applications like business analytics, social media, video streaming and grid computing. Many organisations, regardless of their area of business, want insight from new and unstructured sources such as news reporting, web usage trends and social media chatter.

The ability to access and retrieve data quickly is also a major factor contributing to business success and/or customer satisfaction. But there's a lot of data to handle. Just keeping up with this relentless growth and storing of data is challenge enough, but how to deal with such vast volumes of data cost-effectively? And perhaps most importantly: How to maintain or even improve storage performance?

TRP: What is a storage bottleneck? Where and when do bottlenecks tend to occur?

TP: As the volume of data increases, so too can the time it takes to access it. This is known as a 'bottleneck'. There are many potential locations for 'pain points' or bottlenecks in an enterprise system, so locating the bottleneck is not always simple. Addressing the bottleneck and maintaining performance is the rationale behind continual advances in storage technologies today.

When designing storage systems for performance, it is essential to understand where the bottlenecks can occur. This is especially true given that the bottlenecks change with each new generation of technology along the data storage path.

The three most critical elements that affect storage performance are the server's Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe®) bus, the SAS solution as implemented in host bus adapters (HBAs) and expanders, and the disk drives themselves, which can have either a SAS or a SATA interface.

Storage bottlenecks migrate among the successive generations of the various technologies involved end-to-end. With the advent of third generation PCIe, for example, second generation SAS became the new storage bottleneck. Third generation SAS is now able to take full advantage of third generation PCIe's performance, making PCIe the new bottleneck in systems using 12Gb/s SAS.

TRP: What guidelines can we use to maximise storage system performance?

TP: When designing a storage system for high performance, it is necessary to understand the throughput limitations of each element. Critical applications must also scale easily over time while remaining both highly protected and easily manageable.

SAS is now in its third generation, and the performance has doubled with each new generation from the original 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s and now 12Gb/s. SAS, like PCIe uses lanes and high performance storage systems normally aggregate multiple SAS lanes to support high data rates.

TRP: Does the storage bottleneck change with different system configurations?

TP: This table provides a summary of some sample configurations showing where the bottleneck exists when configured with a "full complement" of disks (the slowest element in the system). As shown, the need to support more disks (for capacity) requires the use of later generations of SAS and/or PCIe, and/or more SAS lanes.

Looking at it another way, in systems with a small number of disks, their relatively low aggregate throughput becomes the bottleneck, so there is no need to "over-design" the configuration with later generation technologies and/or more SAS lanes. The disks referenced in the table example all have a 6Gb/s interface with a throughput of 230MB/s and 550MB/s for the 15K RPM HDDs and SSDs, respectively.

Note that the table assumes all drives are operating at their maximum throughput simultaneously, and this does not always occur. It is also important to note that IOPs is often more critical than throughput in many applications today, depending on the circumstances. For these reasons, each configuration is normally able to support many more disks than indicated.

TRP: So how can SAS third generation improve performance for businesses?

TP: Being able to move at 12Gb/s means that measurements of over one million IOPS can be achieved. 12Gb/s SAS is an evolutionary change and a big step forward for the market. For the first time IT managers will be able to exploit the full potential of PCIe 3.0. This in turn will benefit businesses that rely on mission-critical data in a variety of environments, including transactional databases, data mining, video streaming and editing.

TRP: What are the issues in migrating to SAS third generation?

TP: The primary issue in the migration to third generation SAS is a familiar one: investment protection. Most organisations have made a significant investment in SAS disks, and want to preserve that investment when migrating to 12Gb/s SAS technology. The problem is: The third generation SAS standard maintains backwards compatibility by throttling down to the slowest SAS data rate in the system.

In small-scale point-to-point configurations, this is not always an issue because the migration would require upgrading both an Initiator and its Target. But in most organisations, such point-to-point configurations are rare.

The system-level "slowest data rate" performance limitation, therefore, means that in organisations without point-to-point configurations would not be able achieve the 12Gb/s performance boost until all disks support this new standard.

TRP: How can this issue be overcome?

TP: Fortunately there is a way to overcome this limitation, and that requires understanding a little about how SAS expanders function. A SAS expander makes it possible for a single (or multiple) Initiator(s) to communicate with multiple Targets concurrently. Expanders help make SAS remarkably scalable, and because each is capable of supporting multiple disks, expanders also makes it possible to aggregate the throughput of those disks.

Updated: Apple may do away with Beats Music brand, streaming service is safe

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Update: Apple has chimed in that TechCrunch's story is "not true," though the company appears to have some changes planned for the Beats Music brand.

According to Re/code, which spoke with an Apple spokesperson as well as unnamed sources, Apple isn't shutting down the Beats Music service, though it may implement modifications over time.

While Beats Music isn't necessarily going away, the Beats Music brand may disappear. Apple doesn't want to stop of streaming music, but it's all pretty nebulous how it will proceed and what branding it will use for whatever it offers users down the road.

Original story below...

Apple is ready to forget about Beats Music, the streaming service it picked up as part of a blockbuster Beats acquisition four months ago.

According to multiple sources of TechCrunch, Apple plans to shut down Beats Music, though exactly when isn't clear.

With Beats Music engineers apparently already turning their attention to other projects (including iTunes), no built-in app on the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, nor any mention of integration during the Apple Watch announcement, it seems Apple is ready to press pause permanently on the brand.

It's widely thought Apple's multi-billion dollar buy of Beats was never about Beats Music, not least because its user numbers are paltry. Bringing co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine into the Apple fold was much more of a coup, not to mention Beats' high-profile headphone business.

Throw in the fact Apple is all about brand continuity, and keeping Beats Music running alongside iTunes doesn't mesh with the Cupertino modus operandi.

Soooo, now what?

We've heard for months that Apple's download model has struggled to keep up as streaming music competitors like Spotify, Pandora and Google Music rack in users.

Beats Music tried to attract listeners with its curated playlists and free trials, but it failed to catch more than 250,000 subscribers.

While Apple may be done with Beats Music, it's very unlikely it's done with music all together. It still has a huge iTunes following as well as iTunes Radio. One TechCrunch source said Apple may tie streaming into iTunes; imagine pressing a "Play" button, for example, situated next to a "Buy" button.

While iTunes isn't going anywhere, Apple may have a major music announcement lined up for 2015.

Until then, we'll wait for official word on the fate of Beats Music. We've asked Apple for comment, but a straight answer isn't likely forthcoming.

What can you expect with the iPad Air 2?

In depth: The Best of Maker Faire NYC 2014

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The coolest projects from Maker Faire NYC

Maker Faire, the greatest show and tell in the world graced New York this past weekend with its biggest display yet. This year's event brought a new slew of start-ups along with the usual lineup of giant 3D printers, massive robots, new development boards and a cast of costumed characters.

Whether you're with a start-up looking for a technological solution, a tinkerer in search of new toys or just a kid at heart who wants to learn something new, Maker Faire is a show that has something for everyone. So come with us as we look back at the coolest things from the World Maker Faire NYC show.

x86 computing on a postage stamp

Maker Faire, World Maker Faire NYC, Intel, Microsoft, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Edison, Kinect, Xbox One, Newstrack

Intel has long slept in the maker world, letting Arduino and all its variants shape the microcontroller landscape. The PC processor giant recently announced two development boards, called the Galileo and Edison to catch the attention of self-starter developers.

Released just last week at IFA 2014, Edison is essentially a mini-computer. It comes equipped with a 500MHz dual-core Atom processor that can run x86 applications and most Linux distributions. If the specs weren't impressive enough, we got our first in-person look at Edison and it's no bigger than an SD flash card.

Onboard this tiny computer there's also a low-power 100MHz Intel Quark processor designed for wearables. Edison is a fully packed, standalone system complete with 1GB of RAM, 4GB of eMMC storage and built-in Wi-Fi as well as low-energy Bluetooth 4.0.

Intel demoed Edison at Maker Faire booth by building it into a hard hat-mounted emergency alert system made for construction workers. The Intel researchers demonstrated how the system worked by swinging a baseball bat onto the hardhat. The impact then triggered motion sensors to activate a GPS signal, which would in turn help rescuers on the location of the construction worker in peril.

Arduino branches out to Linux and connected homes

Maker Faire, World Maker Faire NYC, Intel, Microsoft, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Edison, Kinect, Xbox One, Newstrack

Since hitting the maker block in 2005, Arduino has spawned thousands of microcontrollers. Now nine years later at a Maker Faire NYC talk Arduino Project co-founder Massimo Banzi said the platform is maturing into a more user-friendly platform.

Banzi shared Arduino Tre is almost ready for its big release as the "most powerful Arduino to date." The Tre will be Arduino's first microcontroller powered by ARM Cortex-A8 processor made in partnership with Texas Instruments.

On top of the more powerful hardware, Tre is also slated to be the first Arduino capable of running a full version of Linux. Meanwhile, Banzai said the Arduino team has been hard at work developing a stack of software, which will make it easier for everyone to use especially if they aren't Linux geeks.

Banzai also touched on the Arduino Connected Apartment - an internet-connected home experiment the microcontroller team is running in collaboration with futurist Bruce Sterling.

The apartment is actually a mock living space located in Arduino's Turin, Italy headquarters. Along with Sterling's lavishly designed Italian furniture, the apartment is furnished with the latest technology made for the maker community including many Atmel based devices.

"All of the houses of the future are fake, but you'll be able to rent ours on Airbnb," Banzi said at his Maker Faire presentation.

Raspberry Pi becomes the backbone of devices

Maker Faire, World Maker Faire NYC, Intel, Microsoft, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Edison, Kinect, Xbox One, Newstrack

Speaking of computers on a stick, Raspberry Pi's Director of Hardware Engineering James Adams was at Maker Faire to present the future of the credit card sized PC.

Moving beyond the classroom and educational uses the Raspberry Pi foundation introduced a B+ model. The main highlight of this new computer board is it has more connectors including a 40-pin GPIO header and four USB 2.0 ports.

Along side the model B+, the foundation also launched its Compute Module Development Kit in April. With these new additions Raspberry Pi has become a platform for developers to create new inventions such as the Slice media player and the recently announced ProtoCam.

Despite moving into a new market of makers and device creators, Adams clearly stated the Raspberry Pi is still a charity and will put education first. "We [the Raspberry Pi Foundation] are and will continue to spend all of our money on creating educational resources," Adams said.

Scan yourself

Maker Faire, World Maker Faire NYC, Intel, Microsoft, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Edison, Kinect, Xbox One, Newstrack

The new Kinect for Windows might not be here yet, but when it's finally released users will be able to scan their face and have a plastic copy sent to their house.

On September 16 Microsoft announced a new R5 version of its 3D Builder, which gave households without a 3D printer a new option to buy a print and have it sent home.

At Maker Faire the Redmond company had a custom PC connected to a Kinect for people to scan themselves into a 3D model. The process was so simple anyone could do it. All it required were a few clicks and then panning the Kinect horizontally across the subject.

At another table, Microsoft also set up a Kinect that would scan booth visitors transforming them into Xbox One avatars. I witnessed the Kinect create a virtual selfie of a child in just a few seconds using three simple scans.

A company spokesperson explained that the imaging sensor first creates a wardrobe for the user's virtual self by detecting what color their clothes are. The depth-sensing camera then photo copies a user's face, noting facial structure - from the shape of their nose to the distance between their eyes - all while recording their skin color.

The Microsoft spokesperson also said the team had been working on the technology for some time, but could not share whether the feature would come to Xbox One. The spokesperson declined to comment on an exact release date for the new Kinect for Windows.